Both compelling artists in their own medium, Kay O’Rourke and Gina Freuen learned their styles in the same home.

Spend time with siblings and you may discover their secret language. Several conversations at once, inside jokes, knowing looks, the occasional flare-up of deep-rooted tensions.

When artists Gina Freuen and Kay O’Rourke get together, their secret sibling language suggests balance and synergy. While both inherited their mother’s artistic nature — she painted, ran an art gallery and taught art in the family home — the way her influence manifests itself is quite different, at least on the surface.

Freuen is primarily a potter, known for figurative teapots and similar forms in minimalist glazes created through a lifetime of experimenting with firing techniques. O’Rourke is primarily a painter, also figurative, and decidedly narrative, with surreal overtones and decadent color on her large oil canvasses.

Below the surface, however, there is a balance to the sisters’ work, a synergy in how they express themselves, which is what makes their upcoming exhibition at the Art Spirit Gallery so intriguing. It’s a rare glimpse into two

facets of shared and
separate experiences, reflecting infinitely back on those experiences
through the filter of each artist’s unique vision.

In
Freuen’s Mead-area home they talk about process and control, about
making meaning through art. Freuen pulls out three sculpted arms: one
holds onto something tightly, another is letting go, while the third has
completely released. Freuen said she looks forward to letting go more
now, especially with a new kiln she built that allows her to gas-fire
and wood-fire to create the spontaneous surface colors. We talk about
how pottery necessitates a willingness to let go because of the firing
process, and Freuen concedes that she has always tended to find comfort
in structure.

O’Rourke,
on the other hand, seems to embrace the unknown that emerges on her
canvases, informed in part by the multitude of books she reads at any
given time. Earth Knowledge 2, for example, relates to a Celtic
myth. It’s one of several new paintings that include fish, birds and the
litany of characters O’Rourke culls from her real and imagined life.

We note the difference in studios, too.

Freuen’s
rows of glazes are organized by size and color. O’Rourke laughs about
her seemingly chaotic workspace. Then Freuen pulls out a new piece,
“Sisters,” which incorporates a tall, figurative base that reads like
the lower portion of a body, into which fits a rounded form, like a
belly, into which another figurative piece is placed. It becomes
quieter.

And just
like that we are not just talking about art anymore. Something deeper
creeps into the conversation, something that’s likely been there all
along. We talk candidly about how they handled — separately and together
— the loss of one parent and the devastating illness of another.
And the pieces take on a new sheen: Freuen’s exploring comfort, solace,
nurturing and nesting; O’Rourke’s favoring motifs like the journey,
origins, flight, growth and transformation.

One
can read too much into things, of course, which is both the beauty and
bane of art, while others see little connection. In fact, Freuen noted,
even though they’ve exhibited throughout the area for decades and even
exhibited together several years ago with collaborative works, few
people seem to know they’re sisters. Maybe that’s because they’ve been
talking in their secret language of siblings.